When you say “not quite there yet”, what issues did you run into?

Do you already have a bridge setup and hooked up to your account, eg https://jmp.chat? If you go to add a contact, for instance, it will let you add a phone number and automatically append the bridge address (@cheogram.com in this case)

I’ve been using Cheogram (another Conversations fork that adds features related to telephone dialing and SMS gateways; if you don’t use one of those, it’s probably not super useful and Conversations is a better choice). I think it’s only available on F-Droid, sadly: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.cheogram.android/

I think they meant that the reference client/server get the new features. You’re correct that the other third party clients have the same issue as XMPP where they all implement their distinct subsets of features or take a long time to update. Having the specs in one giant document or in multiple little documents doesn’t make much difference there.

If you have some technical ability and are on Android I’d setup sshd on the phone (there are various apps to do this easily) and use rsync(1) or scp(1).

If you want something less technical, I use the Conversations app on my phone and Dino on my desktop for chat and sometimes send files to myself. Not ideal, but it does work pretty well for one-off smaller files.

This is one of the big trade offs: Matrix has a big VC funded client/server implementation that gets new features right away. On the other hand, because of this it only has a few alternative clients and servers. XMPP on the other hand has a large and vibrant client/server ecosystem, but no single client/server pair that are funded and get new features right away. Generally speaking I think this is a good thing and it’s one of the reasons I decided to start doing XMPP development over Matrix development back when I was comparing them initially, but YMMV.

The “not actively developed” is wrong too; XMPP is very active and has been for a lot longer than matrix, meaning it generally has a lot of problems solved that Matrix is still working on re-inventing the wheel on.

XMPP has supported bridges for a long time too (since the early 2000’s, at least), for example, jmp.chat runs bridges between it and the telephone network, SMTP, IRC, and probably others that I’m forgetting. Disroot also runs an IRC bridge, as do a lot of XMPP servers.